#bonsaiHackathon

[thingsthatilearn]

First blog...starting out with a first time hackathon experience

I am new to the world of semantic web (including blogging). An industrial ecologist by profession, I use some handy environmental assessment tools to analyze environmental impacts of industrial products and processes.  Enthusiastic about the need for open, accessible and quality data for sustainability assessments lead me join a week long hackathon with experts in industrial ecology, software development and computer science. To be honest I felt a tad bit foreign to this environment. Yes its true that I have been working with industrial ecology tools for years but I had no previous knowledge in software or database development. The hackathon agenda to develop a pilot example of an open database platform seemed like a rather daunting assignment. Terms such as ‘machine readable’, ‘RDF’ , ‘Schema’, ‘Python’, ‘Parsing’, ‘Property relations’ or ‘Flow object’ are the common jargons here. But my fears were quickly put to rest as I realized that on this platform each is an expert in their domain trying to understand the other. We were divided in multiple working groups with several deliverables. Almost all of our work has been documented in github repos (still needs some housekeeping) but we are in hope that our efforts are 100 per cent reproducible. Hence I start with one of my first post hackathon tasks. To share with you the main outcomes of the hackathon in ‘human readable’ (pun intended) language, one step (repository) at a time.